RE: Jewisn rap? (+ popular/"classical" music)

[music <music...>]

Alex Lubet wrote:

I tend to think that rap, like any other idiom, is capable of worthy and 
unworthy outpourings.  ... I get concerned when folks deem what they like 'art' 
and what they don't 'not art,' as subs for their personal standards of 'good' 
and 'bad.'  Art is a noun, not an adjective.  Can't there be good and bad art?  
Can't one acknowledge cultural work that 'works' for others but not for 
oneself?  If not, democratic pluralism is a wee bit troubled.  I apologize if 
that seems a little harsh, but I've been having this conversation at work for 
decades.  I'm coming around to the position that pop culture in general did 
better in the previous century than 'high' culture and that I need make no 
apologies for making my living (mostly) teaching it in a research university.



Alex makes a perfectly valid point, and I for one do *not* equate what I like 
with "art" and what I don't with "not art" -- or with good and bad, for that 
matter.  Here the New York Times's favorite TV listings squib-movie-review 
language -- "good of this kind" -- comes to mind.  I don't like most opera, 
some kinds (but **not** all) of jazz, and, for that matter, lots of rock; I'm 
bored by lots of modern dance and even some ballet.  But that doesn't make any 
of these not art -- or even "bad".  (Litmus test:  I believe in NEA  and state 
councils' funding of art forms that I don't much like and don't often or ever 
patronize.)  

And as for popular culture generally, I absolutely *don't*, for a moment, 
reject its claims to legitimacy as art -- and, really, it doesn't matter 
whether we call it "art" or not.  In my CD liner notes for OPEN THE GATES! I 
quoted with approval the music historian Richard Crawford as observing that in 
this century, "we've learned ... that all kinds of music performed in the 
popular sphere has turned out to be transcendant."  That is to say, even better 
than good.  If music can move us, inspire us, lift our spirits, deepen our 
experience, whatever -- it's real and it's good. 

Does rap do *any* of that?  Hey, I'm perfectly open to listening to other povs 
-- and even, if I must (or have to bargain, Martha Stewart-wise, for a 
substitute for prison time), to listening to selected examples.  But for now, I 
still think it's junk.

-- Robert Cohen
   cdbaby.com/openthegates

P.S.  On the subject of popular music as music of stature, Alex Ross's recent 
article "Listen to This" in The New Yorker is already being widely quoted:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040216fa_fact4

for sentences like this:

"I have always wanted to talk about classical music as if it were popular music 
and popular music as if it were classical."

"The twenties saw a huge change in music?s social function. Classical music had 
given the middle class aristocratic airs; now popular music helped the middle 
class to feel down and dirty. There is American musical history in one brutally 
simplistic sentence."

and, definitively:

"All music becomes classical music in the end."


And the Richard Crawford quote is from an earlier and superb (though virtually 
never quoted sfaik, except by me) "conversation" with him that appeared in 
HUMANITIES, the magazine of the NEH:

http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/1997-11/crawford.html

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